Watergate’s Final Secrets

An attempted coup d’etat by Richard Nixon, stopped by two intrepid young reporters from the Washington Post and their dashing and heroic editor.

The 1976 movie, “All the President’s Men,” retold the story with Robert Redford as Bob Woodward, Dustin Hoffman as Carl Bernstein and Jason Robards in his Oscar-winning role as Ben Bradlee. What did Bradlee really think of Watergate?

In a taped interview in 1990, revealed now in Yours in Truth: A Personal Portrait of Ben Bradlee, Bradlee himself dynamites the myth: “Watergate … (has) achieved a place in history … that it really doesn’t deserve. … The crime itself was really not a great deal. Had it not been for the Nixon resignation, it really would have been a blip in history.”

“The Iran-Contra hearing was a much more significant violation of the democratic ethic than anything in Watergate,” said Bradlee.

Yet when the Iran-Contra scandal hit the Reagan White House, Bradlee chortled, “We haven’t had this much fun since Watergate.”

All fun and games at the Post. Yet with Nixon’s fall came the fall of South Vietnam, thousands executed, hundreds of thousands of boat people struggling in the South China Sea, and a holocaust in Cambodia.

Still, what is most arresting about Yours in Truth is the panic that gripped Bob Woodward when Jeff Himmelman, the author and a protege of Woodward, revealed to him the contents of the Bradlee tapes.

Speaking of “All the President’s Men,” Bradlee had said, “I have a little problem with Deep Throat,” Woodward’s famous source, played in the movie by Hal Holbrooke, later revealed to be Mark Felt of the FBI.

Bradlee was deeply skeptical of the Woodward-Felt signals code and all those secret meetings. He told interviewer Barbara Feinman: “Did that potted palm thing ever happen? … And meeting in some garage. One meeting in the garage. Fifty meetings in the garage… there’s a residual fear in my soul that that isn’t quite straight.”

Bradlee spoke about that fear gnawing at him: “I just find the flower in the window difficult to believe and the garage scenes. … If they could prove that Deep Throat never existed … that would be a devastating blow to Woodward and to the Post. … It would be devastating, devastating.”

When Himmelman showed him the transcript, Woodward “was visibly shaken” and repeated Bradlee’s line — “there’s a residual fear in my soul that that isn’t quite straight” — 15 times in 20 minutes.

Woodward tried to get Bradlee to retract. He told Himmelman not to include the statements in his book. He pleaded. He threatened. He failed.

That Woodward became so alarmed and agitated that Bradlee’s bullhockey detector had gone off over the dramatized version of “All the President’s Men” suggests a fear in more than just one soul here.

A second revelation of Himmelman’s is more startling.

During Watergate, Woodward and Bernstein sought to breach the secrecy of the grand jury. The Post lawyer, Edward Bennett Williams, had to go to see Judge John Sirica to prevent their being charged with jury tampering.

No breach had occurred, we were assured.

We were deceived.

According to Himmelman, not only did Bernstein try to breach the grand jury, he succeeded. One juror, a woman identified as “Z,” had collaborated. Notes of Bernstein’s interviews with Z were found in Bradlee’s files.

Writes Himmelman: “Carl and Bob, with Ben’s explicit permission, lured a grand juror over the line of illegality …”

This means that either Woodward, Bernstein, and Bradlee lied to Williams about breaching the grand jury, or the legendary lawyer lied to Sirica, or Sirica was told the truth but let it go, as all were engaged in the same noble cause — bringing down Nixon.

Who was that grand juror? Woodward, Bernstein and Bradlee know, but none is talking and no one is asking. The cover-up continues.

Had one of Nixon’s men, with his approval, breached the secrecy of the Watergate grand jury, and lied abut it, that aide would have gone to prison and that would have been an article of impeachment.

Conduct that sent Nixon men to the penitentiary got the Post‘s men a stern admonition. Welcome to Washington, circa 1972.

With the 40th anniversary of the break-in coming up this June, Himmelman’s book, well-written and revelatory of the temper of that time, will receive a wider reading.

As will Max Holland’s Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat, out this spring and the definitive book on why J. Edgar Hoover’s deputy betrayed his bureau and sought to destroy the honorable man who ran it, L. Patrick Gray.

With Bernstein’s primary source spilling grand jury secrets, and Mark Felt leaking details of the FBI investigation to Woodward, both of the primary sources on which the Washington Post‘s Pulitzer depended were engaged in criminal misconduct.

At Kay Graham’s Post, the end justified the means.

Redford is now backing a new documentary, “All the President’s Men Revisited.” The Sundance Kid has his work cut out for him.

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2 Responses to Watergate’s Final Secrets

Buchanan can rationalize all he wants about how the Washington Post and Mark Felt conspired to bring down Richard Nixon but the bottom line is they would not have had anything to bring him down with had the Preisdent of the United States not allowed himself to been blackmailed by rouge intelligence officer. It would have been very easy for Nixon to take responsibility for overzealous aides, perhaps fire Chuck Colson and apologize and put the whole matter aside. Instead he brought a crime he did not know about nor specifically authorize right to his own desk by this action and his request to have the CIA lean on the FBI to block the investigation. The “honorable” L. Patrick Gray was willing to let this happen, his deputy Mark Felt and perhaps many others in the Bureau, were not. And at some point they decided to do something about it and that was to contact two unknown metro reporters at the Post who were on the beat.

Now if anyone wishes to call this coup, I will not argue with them. Felt was certainly no whistleblower and it wouldn’t suprise me Bernstein was tampering with the grand jury. But Felt also wasn’t going to let the White House get away with committing a crime or have the Presidency be subject to extortion. Defending Nixon’s rather stupid actions for such a brilliant a mind is simply another case of tribal politics (“I didn’t like Nixon until Watergate.” as M.Stanton Evans put it). Luckily Ronald Reagan emerged to cut through such clutter and restore a measure of respect to conservatives when he said, in announcing his candidacy for President” in 1975 he was running against not Ford or even the Demcrats but the “evil incarnate in the buddy system of Washington.”

Patrick J. Buchanan ”
the author of Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? ” and also the former Richard M. Nixon speechwriter, if memory serves. Funny how Patrick doesn’t wish to be associated with his disgraced innocent political martyr. Pat doesn’t get it and never will. Neither did Dick Nixon. The break-in and cover-up were revealed to be the tip of the iceberg – that iceberg consisting of a mare’s nest of malicious and illegal abuses of Presidental power. Dick was sure he was above the law and that he was justified in doing whatever he wanted to strike at his enemies and imagined enemies.

Unfortunately, he was not the last President to believe this and to act this way.